Wednesday 28 March 2012

Night time wanderings of trainee humans.

Of course it has been a while since my last post, it always is. I have been very busy trying to retrain to be incompetent in a completely new arena, and have been delighting in savagely bi-polar behaviour from the Nazgul. The resulting stress levels have been spectacular and I have indulged in such hobbies as forgetting to turn the gas stove-top off for 6 hours, drawing very odd characters such as "Kevin the Ant thief", "Ralph the King of the Purple Lizards" and "Jack the BAD frog" for the children, completely forgetting then getting disturbed when I find the pictures. Fun times indeed.

Things wouldn't be so dire if the Nazgul hadn't started a new hobby, where between 9pm and 2 am is WAKE TIME. This mainly involves her laying in bed yelling "My Mummy. I want my Mummy" then when I go in, tenderly stroking my face saying "My Mummy. I wake my Mummy up" and then demonically laughing for ages. In a fit of desperation the other night, I hurled There's a Hippopotamus on the Roof Eating Cake at her and said "Just read this in bed" and stumbled off into a wall. I was so sleepy I had forgotten her reading that book just involves her sitting there shouting "HOMO" at every page, so the sounds coming through the monitor from her room sounded more like a group of bogans on train platform, than a toddler reading session.

Anyway, I am not alone in this. I am actually comparatively lucky, it seems the new craze sweeping the nation's 2.5 yr olds is waking up in the middle of the night and running amok through the house. Many of my friends seem to have discovered they have tiny little Keith Richards' rampaging through their homes any time sleep is attempted. There has been a lot of buzz on the inter-webs that "this too shall pass", "it is a developmental stage", "you just have to stay consistent" blah blah blah, bottom line being that it will improve and you just have to wait for their developing brains to finish this particularly phase of rewiring. All I can say is BULLSHIT. I have developed a fool proof strategy for getting the little bastards to stay in bed (and this is heaps better than my other ideas of getting Brian Blessed to do Jane Austen audio books, roller pants, and us changing our surname to Eastwood). I have written a meditative story to read to young children, with a clear subtext that they can relate to their own existence and therefore be aided in developing new strategies around sleep.


Night-time Meditations for Naughty Little Boys.

Are you snuggled comfy under your covers? Ok now, Mummy will read you one story and then it’s time for lights off and time for sleep.

Once upon a time, not as long ago as you might think, there was a little boy/girl who used to get out of bed every night. Every night their Mummy would tuck them in, kiss them good night but they just wouldn’t stay in bed. Their Mummy was so beautiful and worked so hard but was so sad because their little boy/girl was so horrible.
One night, the little child was EVEN worse than before, he/she jumped out of bed so HARD that he/she woke up SLICER-BEASTIE.




Slicer Beastie, has metal teeth and lives under the beds of children. When children get up when they are not allowed, Slicer Beastie wakes up and drags them by their ankles under the bed and eats their little faces off.
Now, Good night Sunny/Erin/Rachel/Lucy/Orion/Elijah/Fern/Amber. Sweet dreams. Mummy will come in and check that you are still alive. Love you poppet. 

The End


Now, off to work towards my dream of being a developmental psychologist.